I often have said this over the years, that I’m Made of Love.
One so all-encompassing I couldn’t wish harm on anyone, it’s just not something that ever springs to mind.
Like my son, I am empathy on two stuttering feet, absorbing the air around me and everything in it. I radiate love outward, patience, kindness, consideration, these are second nature.
I give and give of myself, wishing only the best on others. Hoping that my energy and companionship, whatever level that happened to be, will make the lives of others better. That I can touch the world with a color that isn’t easily forgotten, that I’d become a stain of sunset that streaks the cornea long after the night has fallen.
I didn’t want to be forgotten, so I have always given all of me, as much as I could, for approval and attention. Until I was a stranger to myself, and a little of everything to everyone else. It meant something and as long as they needed me they would have parts of me.
And then I left Her. I left the one I wanted to give everything to, all of me, and I came back to my son. I left behind mementos, treasured books, parts of my history, pieces of my ancestors. I left my heart. I left her the month before a pandemic took the world in its squeeze, before a freeze isolated us all in Texas for a week, and I looked around and realized how MUCH I had given.
To everyone. So much that there was nothing left for me. Nothing left of the girl I loved so passionately as a child, even though she was still there, waiting. She’d given all of her as well, from a very young age being told who she was and what life would be for her, without ever knowing that there is a choice. I didn’t know there was a choice.
I fell and fawned, I gifted my all until my vessel was empty. And remembered there were emptier days decades before, ones I filled with stories and books and wild places. When teachers at school were harridan-like monsters who would torment me in front of the class, and my peers saw me as an easy target. Which I was. I didn’t have it in me to fight or to be cruel. I was made of love, after all.
That little girl still sits in a corner of my mind, covering her ears with her hands and singing herself a refrain of comfort “Why can’t we all just get along?”, over and over again.
I thought it was safest to show my compliance, my willingness, my service, and so I gave it freely. I gave to humans until I didn’t have anything left. And turned with empty hands to look, and there they were, waiting, my books and my wild places. My serenity in solitude.
There I was alone, in Texas, frozen into place in February. I turned within, I drove myself a little mad, I cried holding myself tight to trees, just to have something living to wrap my arms around that could stand with me through the storms. No one else could see them, they raged within me.
And now…I find myself realizing months later that for some time instead of pouring all of this love into others I’m finally pouring it into myself. It took the storms to allow myself to save me.
This infinite love that grew and multiplied outwards and towards others reflected on the ice outside until I realized that I never had enough for everyone, but I always had enough for the little girl who was made of tenderness. And the women I’ve become and left behind, there is enough for them too.
They deserve peace. They deserve forgiveness. They deserve this infinite giving. They deserve me.
I deserve this love.
I’ve been told over and over by my parents while growing up how selfish I am. I feel selfish most days. But I’m learning that peace isn’t selfish. Giving to myself isn’t selfish. Gifting the solitude and room for my own thoughts in a world so very full of everyone else’s noise is necessary. It is essential.
And even though I still feel the first spark of fawning and giving to others when they hand me their “Asks” I have to step back and remember to hold enough for myself first.
I’ve been taken on as apprentice in a local woodshop, learning woodturning, shaping gorgeous bowls and cups and goblets from raw harvested wood. Even in the hot summer in an un-cooled garage shop in Texas this is quickly growing on me. I truly wish I didn’t have a full time job that kept me away 40-45 hours a week. During the day I work and watch videos inbetween busy times, trying to hone my skills as I click away trapped at a desk indoors.
I find myself more contented turning wood on a lathe, that balance of danger and excitement and creativity swirling all around me while my mind is silent, just watching the wood turn and form and change colors as I move.
The trees have always talked to me when I’ve been outdoors among them. I think that’s why I prefer the woods to the desert, because there is so much awareness everywhere around, I can feel the trees hugging the winds as they dance, see their little fingers reaching in slow motion to the sun. There’s a low rhythmic pulse to trees that I feel to the deepest layer of my skin, my very cells pull to them in turn. I can’t help but touch them as I pass by, whispering a silent greeting out of the corner of my eyes, winking my secrets to the only ones who understand.
So when I take a branch or trunk in my hands to imagine the piece of art held inside, my soul longs to honor the living creature that once traced the skies. I ache to bring the swirls of my fingerprints in sync with the life circles held within.
To shape the body of a tree is to respect the decades of lives they nourished and touched, just a tree, nothing more, but to a beetle or doe or squirrel it once was a haven, a living thing, some ONE who held them.
Now I hold a part of them with these hands capable of horrible and ecstatic things and I can hear them pulse still, so I take care with the wood that comes to me. Because this is life and time formed in a living thing. This is the soul cast solid in my hands, and she came to me and only me for a reason.
Every man’s fantasy, yes? I can most certainly see how it appeals, at first glance. There she is, a perfectly shaped little treat, not struggling, with a wry look in her eyes as she gazes with knowing power over the man who sits beside her. Submissives have all the power in Dominant/submissive relationships, after all, but this post isn’t about the dynamic present in the scene.
What struck me most is the comparison between he and she. Where her hair is nicely groomed, smooth and shiny, his is unkempt, swept up like he’s just awoken. Her skin is silky, his is rough, his face unshaven. She’s dressed with some effort and consideration, even wearing shoes in bed, while he is bulging out of his pants with his crack showing, not putting any thought into how he is presented. She is tiny in comparison to his hulking girth.
What is society’s obsession with women being so small they’re almost invisible? We know they want us to be invisible, and silent, and I see this obsession with tiny women as nothing less than an act of trying to erase us. To shrink us, make us less intimidating.
Because women are scary strong and they know it.
The world wants us to be dainty, small, speak lightly, step through society with little feet that barely touch the ground for the spiked heels below them. They want us to restrain our waists into shapes that only pre-pubescent girls have. They want us to be hairless, shiny, perfect little toys. And silent. So silent.
When I was young I was tall with muscles, a tomboy, wild and untamed. I rode horses bareback, my hair streaming behind me, skin dark from the sun, dust on the soles of my naked feet. I loved my feet, how rough they were, how I could take a step without wincing or having to think about where I put my foot. I took the world in stride when alone on the ranches. I was strong and resilient, independent. And wholly unappealing to the majority of MANkind. As I wanted to be.
My best friend was petite as fuck, in an unhealthy way, and my father and grandfather’s eyes followed her about the room as she moved waif-like. I watched them and saw myself in their eyes, how “less” I was because I was more. They both found her absolutely gorgeous, like a ballerina, small and perfect. They never praised me once for my appearance, but talked about my friend in front of me. I began to wish I were delicate and small and found waif-like beauty so appealing that I grew distraught at times knowing I’d never be so. Knowing they’d never think that of me.
I tried to shrink as they wanted, and got ill, didn’t have the energy to ride anymore. I needed so badly to be the small beautiful delicate thing they seemed to worship.
It didn’t last long, and soon I was back to my untamed ways because it wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth trying to shrink myself until I was invisible so that I would be acceptable to the patriarchs in my life. I threw my leg back over my horse’s back and rode off, spitting in the dust and singing my defiance to the Texas skies.
As a grown woman who loves women I am drawn to those who have curves and thighs and butts that are strong and real and very present. Women who elbow their way into the world without worrying about who is watching. Occasionally I’ll notice the sinewy grace of a delicate little thing as I run my errands at the grocery stores, but to me a woman who takes up space and doesn’t apologize for existing will always capture my attention. I admire them, I want to be them, I want to make them know without a doubt how profoundly beautiful they are.
And like them I refuse to diminish until I disappear.
Fuck society trying to reinforce that women should be constantly shrinking themselves so small they’re practically invisible.
Fuck them who want us to be weak.
Fuck anyone who thinks we should take up less space.
Ladies, take it. Take it all, swallow the world until you are swollen with it, stop apologizing for existing in everything that you are, stop feeling less for the fullness of you.
It doesn’t matter how small we are. It will never feel small enough until we stop agreeing to this unwritten contract that insists that we be diminished and less intimidating to society.
Stop letting their fear of our power make us mute ourselves until we’re more palatable. Be big in any and all ways you desire, be it stature or voice or spirit.
This is the only life you have, let yourself be decadent and untamed.
Don’t spend any of it letting them tell you that you must be LESS to be more.
I woke to a glorious morning today. Thunderstorms last night washed the humidity away and left every branch and leaf I passed with glittering morsels of light. The dew hung heavier with the raindrops that didn’t fall from leaves.
A gift for my re-birthday.
My eyes aren’t stained with tears this morning. Three years ago today I thought they’d never end. The beginning of my sobriety came after endless bottles of cheap vodka that I still can smell, and it wrinkles my nose with the memory.
I thought I’d cried all the tears I had, and was dehydrated from poisoning my body for years, but they still came. I remember seeing them, smelling them, smelling me.
It’s amazing how much our bodies can take. How the scent of what we put into them lingers. I smelled of a rusty old whiskey still, my very blood acrid and bitter and biting me from within. My eyes yellow, crusted from old mascara and tears dried overnight. My fingernail beds were stained the color of a smoker’s walls, a nasty stink of rot hung over me.
I hadn’t been able to eat for days. I got my calories from the bottles of vodka littering my hiding places. My belly was swollen from a suffering liver. My soul bruised from the love I’d lost, she was then the love of my life, and I knew it. And she was gone.
I sobered up enough to drive to my blood-sister Amanda’s house, and paced her bedroom, watched the walls, cried alone, puked everything I had into their toilet, hoping that I could vomit the words to make everything alright within me. I’d brought two fresh 1.75 liter bottles in my car, if I didn’t have them I’d be sick. Trapped in a cycle of drinking, my body wasn’t able to let it go until it was almost ready to let it ALL go, to let me fall asleep and not wake up. I wanted it to happen. I was terrified it would.
I can still remember the last drink I poured, the juice mix, the amount I put in the cup. A very large one, the size they hand you when you super-size your drive-thru meal. Half-full of vodka, it was barely enough to make me feel even close to functional. I remember how the sides of the cup bent when I carried it back to my room, lifted it to my lips.
But I couldn’t drink it. Even thinking of sipping it made me gag, and I rushed out of the room to the bathroom on the other side of the wall, and threw up what I’d had before I passed out, then woke, then needed more. More in this cup, poured by my own hand, more to numb me, more to pacify the shakes that wouldn’t leave my hands anymore, the trembling of my arms and legs.
But I couldn’t drink it.
I still can’t explain it, how my body rebelled. I couldn’t see straight, but I walked to Amanda’s bedroom and handed the cup to her husband, telling him don’t waste it.
I was more scared than I can recall ever being. The shakes increased with my anxiety, but I gathered my things, knowing I didn’t have much time before I was truly sick. I drove through thunder and lightning to the panhandle of Texas, away from everything I knew and loved. There was no choice, no free will within the decision. My body made it for me. Just as my body chose to not take that sip, because I didn’t have the strength to do it myself.
I remember I saw a giant wild boar on my right side as I drove, when I got close to my destination. It was rooting in the endless acres beside me, free, never having known the touch of man. How I wished to be that boar, and not myself.
There was no bottle in my car, and it terrified me so much I’d pull over to vomit on the side of road, I was sister to the vast landscape, and the haunting emptiness around made me feel less alone.
The desert held me close and hasn’t let me go. I found beauty in what was desolate. And discovered it echoed how completely blown apart and vacant I felt inside. I couldn’t fill me up with vodka any longer, my body rejected it that Last Holy Significant Time, and rebirth began. It was bloody, and full of rot, smelled of pus and old sick, and I wished I could finally give in and fall asleep and never wake again. I wished it more fervently than I ever had before.
Because it hurts, birth does. It’s tiptoeing the line between life and death, coming from awareness of very little to an overwhelming explosion of sights and smells and sounds that you’d been muffled from before. Sensations overcame me in a cacophony that my body and mind couldn’t comprehend anymore because I’d hidden in a bottle for seventeen years at that point and didn’t allow myself to feel.
There was no longer a buffer between myself and the world, and it was hot and sticky and the skies baked the ground as my brain swilled about my skull trying to figure out which way was up and why had I let myself get here. Why hadn’t I just let myself die? Why was I so afraid to live?
And as the stars spelled my heart above moon baths out in the desert night I’d soak the heat of the day into the water, and not even realize I was crying until my tears were tracks of all the paths I could have taken to not. end. up. here.
But here I was, and the Now saved me, because time is a construct and Now was all I had to hold on to. And it was enough, just as I had to believe I was enough, that my life means something.
Even if I was jaundiced in the desert in the middle of nowhere, a small consciousness in our vast galaxy, I became worthy of saving. I just had to almost lose my life to realize it. My body chose sobriety for me, but I had to choose to keep living.
And it took some time afterwards…it still is…because forgiveness is only easy when I give it to someone else.
But I am discovering I deserve to spend the time making things right again between the me I was and the one I am now.
It is difficult for anyone born and raised in human infrastructure to truly internalize the fact that your view of the world is backward.
Even if you fully know that you live in a natural world that existed before you and will continue long after, even if you know that the wilderness is the default state of things, and that nature is not something that only happens in carefully curated enclaves between towns, something that pops up in empty spaces if you ignore them for a while, even if you spend your whole life believing yourself to be deeply in touch with the ebb and flow, the cycle, the ecosystem as it actually is, you will still have trouble picturing an untouched world.
You will still struggle to understand that human constructs are carved out and overlaid, that THESE are the places that are the in-between, not the other way around.
When did you last touch a tree, bare-handed, to marvel at the roughness?
When did you last say hello to a bird? And mean it?
In my readings I find fiction to be a welcome respite. I “save” books about nature for later because we always save the best things for last, right? Sometimes it’s hard to pick them up and read them, because they FEEL so strongly, and my heart wants to vibrate out my throat until I’m sobbing because very few of us truly care anymore. I feel it so deeply when I read these treasured nature writings that I hoard like my favorite dessert, because I want to savor them in ways that feel so bare and naked and full that they’re almost indecent.
Humans these days seem so determined to separate themselves from our Mother Nature. More than ever we forget we are animals. In a world insulated with plastic and metal and concrete we might as well be aliens from other planets for how much in touch we are with ours.
The last time I slept upon the ground it was Faire season, four months ago, and yet it feels like years. I loathe the Texas summers that make you feel you’re walking in hot soup, breathing liquid, cooking in the sunshine, as everything around me gets crispy and dry from the heat. Leaves don’t fall here because of a change of season, they simply dry up and slide away in the 100 degree weather. I break out in heat rashes this time of year, ones that burn and itch and drive me to madness, steal my sleep, I have to more than once stop myself from slicing my skin free for relief. The sun keeps me from our Mother, so I go to bed early so I can wake before it rises, walk in the soupy air, smell the bark of the trees.
In the dark, the world of man is quieter, and it’s just me and the moon and the bat song diminishing as crickets still sing and birds shake themselves awake.
I carry in my pocket a small buck’s eye seed for luck, a piece of wood from the inside of an old rotting stump, generations old, a small crystalized hag’s stone I found on the trail, a pinch of dirt from my garden. A little magic to keep me connected, perhaps to keep me safe, to let me be invisible to man’s eye so that the trees will embrace me.
I used to listen to music on my walks but stopped as it’s too distracting. Without the music I can hear the rustles of leaves to my left and say good morning to our brother armadillo, without the music I can smell the mushrooms he’s looking for and smile knowing he’s about to hit a good patch. Without human music noise I can hear the quick exhalation of the small buck and his does to my right and walk a bit lighter so as to not frighten them away. I can’t hear the trees calling my name when humans sing in my ears so I choose silence and realize it never was quiet at all. We just make so much noise in our lives now we forget how to listen.
In the world we have created with the internet everything feels so manufactured and unreal. Is it any surprise that laying on the ground seems unnatural or quirky or something other people do, people not us, people not me, those “weirdos”?
Our children spend their time watching YouTube videos or playing games in a world that doesn’t exist, and forget about the real one outside the window. It doesn’t matter to them. Our generation failed them in allowing forgetfulness and plastic and glass and bits of metal to come between them and reality. When the internet and cell towers go down it’s the end of the world for them because they eat fake food and live in manufactured environments and have forgotten how to read paper maps, forgotten how to find their way.
And so I save the books that mean the most to me…with their pages smelling of sleeping trees and ink, I save them for the red string that is bound tight between my heart and the wild places, because it pulls so strongly it hurts. It hurts to be reminded that most people out there don’t feel that searing tension from the mountains pulling us back to them.
Those words written by others as enamored of freedom as I am, they’re a cherished thing, meant to be savored like earth’s last drop of untainted water.
I swirl their words on my tongue before I speak my own, and take my son to sleep on the ground and leave nothing man-made between him and the soil. I teach him to read paper maps and put down his screens to gaze on the moon. I show him how rocks can hold him long after I’m gone, and how they echo eons if he’d just learn to listen.
“Last semester, when I asked my class, as I do each quarter, how many of them had ever spent a night sleeping in the wilderness the answer was zero, and I realized for the first time in my teaching life I might be standing in front of a room full of students for whom the words ‘elk’ or ‘granite’ or ‘bristlecone pine’ conjured exactly nothing…
Now, amid the most sweeping legislative attack on our environment in history, a colleague wondered aloud to me whether it was feasible, or even sane anymore, to teach books that celebrate nature unironically. This planet hadn’t even been mapped properly a couple of hundred years ago, and now none of it, above or below ground, remains unsullied by our need for extraction. As we hurtle toward the cliff, foot heavy on the throttle, to write a poem about the liveliness of a newly leafed out aspen grove or a hot August wind sweeping across prairie grass or the smell of the air after a three-day rain in the maple forest might be at best so unconsciously naiive, and at worst so much part of the problem, we might as well drive a Hummer and start voting Republican.
Maybe. But then again, maybe not. Maybe this is the best time there has ever been to write unironic odes to nature.
I have spent most of my life outside, but for the last three years, I have been walking five miles a day, minimum, wherever I am, urban or rural, and can attest to the magnitude of the natural beauty that is left. Beauty worth seeing, worth singing, worth saving, whatever that word can mean now. There is beauty in a desert, even on that is expanding. There is beauty in the ocean, even one that is on the rise.
And even if the jig is up, even if it is really game over, what better time to sing about the earth than when it is critically, even fatally wounded at our hands. Aren’t we more complex, more interesting, more multifaceted people if we do? What good has the hollow chuckle done anyone? Do we really keep ourselves from being hurt when we sneer instead of sob?
If we pretend not to see the tenuous beauty that is still all around us, will it keep our hearts from breaking as we watch another mountain be clear-cut, as we watch North Dakota, as beautiful a state as there ever was, be poisoned for all time by hydraulic fracturing? If we abandon all hope right now, does that in some way protect us from some bigger pain later? If we never go for a walk in the beetle-killed forest, if we don’t take a swim in the algae-choked ocean, if we lock grandmother in a room for the last ten years of her life so we can practice and somehow accomplish the survival of her loss in advance, in what ways does it make our lives easier? In what ways does it impoverish us?
We are all dying, and because of us, so is the earth. That’s the most terrible, the most painful in my entire repertoire of self-torturing thoughts. But it isn’t dead yet and neither are we. Are we going to drop the earth off at the vet, say goodbye at the door, and leave her to die in the hands of strangers? We can decide, even now, not to turn our backs on her in her illness. We can still decide not to let her die alone.”
I’m just realizing that I’ve been more antisocial for the past few weeks. Which isn’t a bad thing. It feels deep inside like I need to preserve the peace I have and not reach out to those I love. It infuriates me, but that’s how it is in my brain.
I’ve had my son with me for a month now, only broken up by letting him go stay a night with friends or my parents. Then back to me. Which is truly what I wanted. What I need is fighting me though, and it’s painful and doesn’t make sense. Not to anyone but myself. I simply don’t have the extra energy to spend with others when I have someone needing me and in my daily life 24/7. But he comes first. He always will, as I swore when I came back to live in the same town he’s in, when I left Idaho and my Stardust. So more time with him means I’m not as actively interacting with others online, and means I’m much less likely to spend time with anyone outside my home.
The anxiety has been peeking its ugly head again…and I know what is making it come back.
Growing up I shared a bedroom with my little sister until I was eighteen. We had bunkbeds and would separate them now and again, but it never was peaceful. I never felt relaxed in there. Even hanging a curtain between our spaces, or putting a strip of tape down the floor to mark what was hers and what was mine, it didn’t matter. I never had a haven in our home. Growing up an introverted child and yet raised from birth as a Jehovah’s Witness meant I never had peace. There were meetings on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. Saturday mornings we spent in the door-to-door ministry. School during the week full of people, no extracurricular activities because we had to spend every spare moment preparing for the meetings or doing homework. Very rarely would any of us get a chance to be at home without anyone else around, and no one in our family had their own space to retreat. Every room was common space, everything was shared. And every moment full of other people.
Hell is other people.
I’d find my solitude outside. My saviors were books and trees and the cats that lived with our family. They were our family. I’d have a book in hand and wander out to the creek at the bottom of the hill we lived on in town. The creek was attached to the park about half a mile away, and I’d hop from stone to stone when the water was low, stopping to peek at crawdads where it pooled, and toads in the muck lining the water. I’d find trash that washed downstream, sticks long enough to fashion into a bow, little stones to chip into pretend arrowheads. I’d tuck myself under the roots of cottonwoods and willows, read for hours, and never miss a single soul. I’d climb fences in the neighborhood looking for dark unused backyards. I’d climb onto the roof of whatever building was untended, scaling TV antennae in a world before the internet.
When I was twelve we moved away from the little neighborhood, I got riding lessons, dad got my sister and I horses. She never took to hers like I did mine…which I didn’t mind, really. Slowly as my mare and I got closer and trusted one another more we’d wander farther from home, riding for hours at a time, sometimes overnight.
Out under the stars with nothing but a can of beans, some water, a blanket…far away enough on the neighboring ranch that I couldn’t even hear the country roads anymore…I found peace and serenity, the touch of the divine, in ways I never could with other humans around. I’d wait impatiently for my next wandering, and dream of the night skies and the silence punctuated by insect song and owl calls. Being stuck in class the following Monday morning was a torture I’d wish on no one.
As I grew I became more social, I developed crushes, I left behind the peace to find something that fed other urges. I got married at nineteen, moving from sharing a room with my sister to sharing a room with someone I barely knew. My days were full of people at work, people at the Kingdom Halls, and a person at home in my bed. My anxiety elevated. I became an insomniac and started drinking to sleep. I became an alcoholic. I drowned the quiet within me and filled it with everything that I was “supposed” to want, to need, to be.
The wandering girl sat in her room inside me, just waiting for the wild to come back to her. She didn’t realize that she’d turned away from it, pushed it aside, to be the person all of the people expected. She was silenced and couldn’t understand why.
I forgot about her. I lived in a bottle. Her voice was drowned out with cheap vodka and routine and nine-to-fives and endless meetings and field service door-to-door.
I got sober to have a child. I couldn’t sleep, even though I needed it desperately. I stopped flying in my dreams at night. I divorced his dad and the cult at the same time. I began to live in a bottle again when my son was with his new stepmom. I could sleep again, finally. But my dreams had gone. The girl inside was put in my past, and forgotten.
People surrounded me every moment, and my peace was only in my glasses of vodka and annihilation at night in a bottle.
Almost three years ago I finally put it down. I haven’t returned to the bottle. Instead I’ve returned to my life. I listen to the trees again when I walk. They burn a warm heat in my palms when I pass them and touch their leaves. I have time alone, long fought for. The girl is back, blinking her eyes at the light, finally freed from the blacked-out rooms swimming in cheap alcohol.
I pass my days mostly in silence. My ears finally have some rest, but my mind is constantly speaking, singing, stretching, realizing its freedom has returned. I go hiking alone, walking alone, but it’s never quiet. Everywhere is life and my love filling the space between myself and our Mother. Soil cradles me when I stop to rest, trees sing me to sleep, ladybugs alight on my elbows and take wing again in the warm breeze. Stones echo a millennia into my fingertips when I touch them. The soles of my feet root into the deep cool silence beneath me.
They all stop when people are near. No matter how much I love them. No matter how much I need certain ones in my life my soul aches for silence more deeply. Humans shout even when they aren’t making a sound, their skin throbs rhythms that bounce off walls of rooms until it reverberates into screaming, and I can feel them on my skin without even being touched. No longer do I have the insulation of booze to shade me from their noise and needs. If I love them they’re even louder, and I fight my own inclinations to show my people how deeply they matter to me. I can’t have them thinking I don’t need them, want them. Especially not my child.
So when he stays with me full time, when my mind is full of love for him, and meals to make, memories to craft, moments that are precious, I withdraw from the world. Every bit of softness is for him, and I simply don’t have much left for anyone else. Even if my heart is exploding with adoration and I want to cry happy tears for a touch, a cuddle, a kind word, it hurts.
I suffer to have loved ones near, I suffer to know they don’t understand my energy pushing them away even when my arms are full of them and my lips full of adoration and praise. After a lifetime of only hearing the needs of others and ignoring my own I’m on a buttress of rock with waves crashing all around, and the noise is sometimes so loud I can’t hear my own voice anymore.
So those I love, and who love me, please understand I’m fighting my own inclinations to be actively in your company. To keep up with my own needs is sometimes an impossible task. I simply can’t hear me when anyone is around, especially if I love them desperately as I love my own child. And no matter how much I love my son I need my time alone to have a balanced brain. This isn’t a want. This is a need.
This is why my phone is always on silent and turned face down.
This is why I don’t respond immediately when I’m messaged or called.
It’s because I love you so deeply that I disappear from myself and forget the sound of my inner voice. And I can’t allow myself to do that every moment of every day anymore.
A Burd in Flight 